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At the Saturday morning marché in Sommières last month, I was walking through the medieval town centre with Paul.

Walking past a shop window, this inscription in stylo-feutre caught my eye. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s in the exercise of his art that the artist finds a happy compromise with all that has hurt or defeated him in daily life. — Laurence Durrell

I love to see poetry, philosophy or literature venerated in this way. I love the idea of the shopkeeper—a boulangère or a hardware store owner, or a barber, dog-earing a page in the book he was reading and coming in early one morning to write it in his vitrine, to share it with everyone. Feeling so moved by this idea of the cultivated French villager, his hands busy with earning his daily bread but his head full of poetry and prose, I looked up to read the name of his business on the awning above.